About a thousand years ago, I was really into a band called My Life Story. It was 1996: Britannia was about to be very cool and everything that happened in Camden was cool, even an inexpert piercing that immediately became infected, and they were good, goddammit. They were witty and splashy and knowing and pretentious, intensely melodic and defiantly unbothered by the impossibility of making any money if you went around with a 12-piece orchestra.
Looking back, they nearly made it a bunch of times – their debut album, Mornington Crescent, was No 2 in the indie chart in 1995, whatever the hell that meant, and they signed to Parlophone the year after, which is where all the hip cats were.
